


A Game of World Conquest

by Morbane



Category: Danger 5
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 08:07:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once, the Danger 5 team is strictly prohibited from killing Hitler. It might upset the game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Game of World Conquest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seekingferret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/gifts).



“You must be joking!” Tucker forgot himself.

The sit-down gun went off.

“I am not joking,” said Colonel Chestbridge. “The Fuhrer has accepted our invitation to a game across the Board of War.”

Tucker’s mouth was wide open. Ilsa muttered a rapid aside to him.

“Correct, Ilsa, we are to play Risk with the Fuhrer. And of course it’s a trap. We’ll trap him into weakening his entire forces across the world!”

“Forget his _forces_ ,” said Jackson. “You’re saying, we get the Fuhrer in a room with us, for free, and we’re _not_ allowed to kill him?”

“Also correct."

To their sputters, he said, "For once, the stakes are too high.”

Through the arts of the technodruideers, the players that had the upper hand on the board could pick their moment to press a Reality Button, translating the balance of forces on the gameboard to the distribution of forces across the globe.

It was an opportunity that could not be missed.

 

They spent two weeks trying to figure out how to cheat.

With Jackson, Ilsa knew, it would be the cards. Pierre opted for simple distraction. Tucker hummed to himself all the way through twenty _Boy’s Own_ magazines, and carved red and gold dice out of rare crystals that he claimed could be programmed by radio to reposition their weights internally according to the programmer’s desire.

If Tucker thought _that_ wasn’t going to look suspicious, Ilsa thought, then it was his optimism that needed adjusted weight.

There was no one more professional than Danger 5. Because there was no one better than Danger 5, the only possible comparison to Danger 5 was Danger 5, which made the Danger 5 team perfectionistic and internally competitive. Naturally, no one confided in anyone else the full extent of their strategies.

“It could be worse,” said Claire to Ilsa. “We could have practised on Diplomacy.”

 

“ _Reality_ Risk.” Massimiliano Importante cut the ribbon of War and unwrapped the board with a flourish.

But Hitler had a surprise for the Danger 5 team: **missions**.

 _Alaska is not of strategic importance right now,_ Ilsa told herself. But it was hard. Her card ordered her to focus on North America. That was well and good. North America should stay under Allied control. But imagine Alaska returned to Mother Russia, one hundred years after it had been signed over, and its oil and gold reclaimed! How glorious to imagine how it would be to press the Reality Button at the moment that the entire continent was under _her_ personal control. _I could rule your country, Jackson,_ she thought. _How would that feel?_

She had no illusions about his ability to do the same to her. No one sane fought a land war in Asia. But no one sane became distracted from the work at hand by the temptations of superpower dictatorship. Ilsa bit aggressively down on her maraschino cherry and _focused_.

(Were the others equally confounded? What if Tucker or Jackson had the mission to _kill all Red_? And what if one of them had the mission to _kill all Black_ , meaning Hitler, meaning that their natural-born Hitler-killing instincts and the hypnosis of the mission card agreed, causing them to jeopardise the mission by sudden assassination?)

Hitler cited an absurd precedent, and the oceans of the board were filled with sharkmen. The Colonel and Importante consulted, and returned to the board grim-faced, with nothing to say.

The pieces on the board clashed, advanced, and retreated, and the dust of the fallen trickled into the central bowl, slowly filling it, like so much dry blood. The Reality sigil began to fill out. The hour of invocation drew near.

But Ilsa had underestimated Jackson.

He put down the last Totem Warrior that allowed him to invoke Reality, grinned a manic grin, and laid down cards she had never seen until now.

“You can’t beat higher ground, can you?” said Jackson, and pressed the red button. Ilsa thought - _But we were going to get there first!_

The world dissolved. Ilsa found herself knee-deep in very cold water, the lights of what she expected was Sitka twinkling away up the shore. Well, at least she had an air base. Tucker would probably land with an army in Siam. But it was Jackson’s final words that rang in her ears: _“We choose to go to the moon!”_

__

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot imagine that the Allied Command in Danger 5 do their strategic plotting on anything other than a Risk board with small plastic animals.
> 
> Risk is owned by Hasbro; the specific board image used is courtesy of the flickr of pgcummins under a CC BY-NC-SA license; the stegosaurus is in the public domain.


End file.
